History of Baltimore
The Baltimore County area northward was used as hunting grounds by the Susquehannocks living in the lower Susquehanna River valley who "controlled all of the upper tributaries of the Chesapeake" but "refrained from much contact with Powhatan in the Potomac region.
The colonists were initially frightened by the Piscataway in southern Maryland because of their body paint and war regalia, incorrectly assuming they wished to attack the fledgling colonial settlement.
[20] Also around the Basin to the southeast along the southern peninsula which ended at Whetstone Point—today South Baltimore, Federal Hill, and Locust Point—the funding for new wharves and slips came from individual wealthy ship-owners and brokers and from the public authorities through the town commissioners by means of lotteries, for the tobacco trade and shipping of other raw materials overseas to the Mother Country, for receiving manufactured goods from England, and for trade with other ports being established up and down the Chesapeake Bay and in the other burgeoning colonies along the Atlantic coast.
Baltimore sent representatives to the Assembly, and over the next two decades it acquired nine parcels of land and annexed neighboring villages including Fells Point to become an important community on the head of the Patapsco River.
Baltimoreans paid some 300 pounds sterling the next year to erect a fine brick courthouse with a bell tower and steeple on a Courthouse Square (future Calvert Street, between East Lexington and Fayette Streets) along with the necessary "whipping post", stocks (for confining heads and arms), podium for making public announcements and news, and a nearby jail, on the northern hills overlooking the harbor basin and with its back sitting over a rugged cliff and bluffs to the northeast with "Steiger's Meadow" bordering the twisting loop of the Jones Falls which bent southwestward before running north again.
When the Continental Congress authorized the privateering of British merchantmen, eager Baltimore merchants accepted the challenge, and as the war progressed, the shipbuilding industry expanded and boomed.
Credit was the essence of the system and a virtual chain of indebtedness meant that bills remained long unpaid and little cash was used among overseas correspondents, merchant wholesalers, and retail customers.
Frequent crises of credit and the wars with France kept prices and markets in constant flux, but men such as William Lux and the Christie brothers produced a maturing economy and a thriving metropolis by the 1770s.
Francis Scott Key, (1779–1843), a Maryland lawyer from Georgetown and Frederick, was aboard a British ship where he had been negotiating for the release of an American prisoner, Dr. William Beanes.
Key's poem was set to a 1780 drinking song by British composer John Stafford Smith, and "The Star-Spangled Banner" became the official national anthem of the United States in 1931.
Brown next expanded into packet ships, extended his lines to Philadelphia and began financing Baltimore importers, specializing in merchant banking from the late 1820s to his death in 1834.
[37]: 27 In the early 1830s the Baltimore and Port Deposit Rail Road began running trains in the Canton area, and later in the decade it reached Havre de Grace.
Churches, schools, and fraternal and benevolent associations provided a cushion against hardening white attitudes toward free people of color in the wake of Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia in 1831.
[44] Baltimore in the Third Party System had two-party competitive elections, with powerful bosses, carefully orchestrated political violence, and an emerging working-class consciousness at the polls.
They were less concerned with the abolition of slavery, an issue emphasized by Republicans, and much more with nativism, temperance, and religious beliefs, associated with the Know-Nothing Party and strongly opposed by the Democrats.
Already Boston, Chicago, and New York were moving to modernize their public works infrastructures and to support the construction of capital-intensive, technologically sophisticated sewer and water supply systems.
At the same time, fans also followed the draft status and 1918 season of Baltimore native Babe Ruth, then playing with the Boston Red Sox and considering his own options, including joining an industrial league team.
African Americans moving from the South and rural areas with little money and limited job opportunities compromised living conditions by seeking cheaper housing and sharing apartments designed for single-families across multiple large families.
In response to the 1917 supreme court decision that abolished residential segregation and the influx of African American migrants, Mayor James H. Preston ordered housing inspectors to report anyone who rented or sold property to black people in predominantly white neighborhoods.
War mobilization brought federal pressure to unionize the workforce, and by 1941 the leftist CIO had organized most of Baltimore's large industries, while the more conservative AFL also gained many new members.
[70][71] In the late 1950s Martin Luther King Jr. and his national civil rights movement inspired black ministers in Baltimore to mobilize their communities in opposition to local discrimination.
The churches were instrumental in keeping lines of communication open between the geographically and politically divided middle-class and poor blacks, a chasm that had widened since the end of World War II.
The event, held at the entrance to the $1.1 billion 1.6 million-square-foot-facility, honored the many donors including Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, first president of the United Arab Emirates, and Michael Bloomberg.
The Star-Spangled Sailabration festival brought a total of 45 tall ships, naval vessels and others from the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Mexico to Baltimore's Harbor.
[citation needed] On September 19, 2016, the Baltimore City Council approved a $660 million bond deal for the $5.5 billion Port Covington redevelopment project championed by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank and his real estate company Sagamore Development.
[86] The waterfront development that includes the new headquarters for Under Armour, as well as shops, housing, offices, and manufacturing spaces is projected to create 26,500 permanent jobs with a $4.3 billion annual economic impact.
[88] Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake led the signing of three bills that commit the city to the sale of bonds over the next 15 to 20 years to fund the infrastructure for the Port Covington development on September 28, 2016.
In 1806–21 Catholics constructed the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, based on a neoclassical design by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe.
This enabled them to express their anti-elitist or populist "producerist" values of self-discipline, honesty, frugality, and industry; they denounced greed and sought an interdependent common good.
Such producerist views drew on aspects of the Wesleyan ethic, appropriated the commonweal traditions of 18th-century republicanism, and initially resisted those of classical liberal, individualistic, self-interested capitalism.
